The Waterfalls at Tivoli (1737): Art, History and Details

The Waterfalls at Tivoli (1737) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Claude-Joseph Vernet (French, 1714–1789).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Likely Vernet's first major work during his study in Rome, this landscape demonstrates his signature style. Vernet preferred and is remembered for marine subjects and water is also a central theme in this painting. Vernet became the predominant French landscape painter of the 18th century, contributing to a long French tradition. While in Rome, he absorbed the Italian tradition of dramatic, rugged landscape paintings, established by Salvador Rosa in the 1600s. This influence is reflected in Vernet's presentation of the craggy rock formations and cascades that made Tivoli, a small town twenty miles east of Rome, famous. Vernet here synthesizes this style with the calmer pastoral mode, more typical of the French landscape tradition, with its roots in the work of Claude Lorrain. Vernet generally inserted elements of humanity in his work, here evident in the touches of civilization in the background and the fishermen in the foreground. Vernet enjoyed considerable popularity, evidenced by the fact that Napoleon's brother Lucien Bonaparte held this painting as a part of his impressive collection.

Object facts

• Title: The Waterfalls at Tivoli
• Date: 1737
• Creator attribution: Claude-Joseph Vernet (French, 1714–1789)
• Culture: France
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 142.5 x 192.5 x 9 cm (56 1/8 x 75 13/16 x 3 9/16 in.); Unframed: 123.2 x 172.6 cm (48 1/2 x 67 15/16 in.)
• Collection: P - French 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1984.175

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Choix de gravures…de la galeire de Lucien Bonaparte, 1812, Stanza !V (no. 36).
• Buchanan, William. Memoirs of Painting: With a Chronological History of the Importation of Pictures by the Great Masters into England Since the French Revolution. London: Printed for R. Ackerman, 1824.
• Ingersoll-Smouse, Florence. Joseph Vernet, peintre de marine, 1714-1789; étude critique suivie d'un catalogue raisonné de son œuvre peint. Paris: É. Bignou, 1926.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.